Transparency is the watchword today, and the utility sector is no stranger to the changing ways of today’s increasingly wired world – in a good way. Until recently, managing power consumption has been a guessing game of sorts for many commercial and industrial businesses, with electricity bills arriving as many as five weeks after the first kilowatt-hour is consumed. This lag time leaves little, if any, room to manage energy use and costs, and even less opportunity for achieving increasingly important sustainability goals. With the growing desire for spot market intelligence and the popularity of load response programs, in which facilities curtail power usage for financial incentives, the dynamics for overall energy management drives the need for centralized monitoring and control.
Fortunately, technology is beginning to revolutionize the capabilities of energy managers through the advent of energy dashboards. Many online dashboards can now provide a real-time view of energy consumption, enabling facility managers to more closely monitor – and subsequently manage – power usage and related expenditures. Some provide real-time pricing information, as well.
The best dashboards, however, offer not only the ability to see the usage and pricing dynamics, but also the capability to participate in the electricity markets. With these developments, load response is also becoming a standard component of overall energy strategies in many markets, and online energy management has paved the way for businesses to handle energy usage and costs like never before.
The Rise of Automation
Energy management is adapting quickly to the rise of web-based monitoring of both usage and market prices and the resulting ability to better manage total costs. In order to optimize this newfound capability, the next natural step is to add automation to the process. This is particularly important in buildings, where there are often numerous controls systems and many energy-consuming assets whose behaviors can be modified.
Typically, energy management strategies need to map against a variety of building automation and controls systems and both adhere and adapt to specific facility requirements. Web-based online energy management platforms, such as those offered by Constellation Energy and others, provide the ability to automate and select from various pre-engineered strategies.
For example, hotel ballrooms would be potential zones for load curtailment, unless a facility is hosting a wedding in a particular ballroom, during which time that specific zone could be placed off-limits for adjustments. This type of setting can be automated as facility managers are able to choose which assets to deploy or avoid – all done online and in real-time, but with the capability for manual override where necessary.
Vornado/Charles E. Smith, based in the Washington D.C. region, recently saw the benefits of online monitoring and automation firsthand. During an extreme summer heat wave, Vornado received a signal from the grid to participate in a load response event to help avoid a potential blackout. The facility managers were able to select the appropriate pre-determined strategies with a few clicks of a mouse and create an automated response in 27 buildings under management without affecting tenant comfort.
The latter accomplishment is extremely important; that is, as load response grows into a more critical ingredient of overall grid stability, it is likely to be called upon more frequently. It is therefore important to deploy strategies that are non-intrusive and that can be frequently called upon to avoid or minimize disruption to a facility’s daily activities.
Beyond helping to avoid a potential grid emergency, online energy management and its automated capabilities help to promote sustainability efforts and foster overall energy efficiency and awareness. Load response – as managed by these online tools – ultimately enables a facilities manager to reduce energy costs without affecting the critical mission of providing a safe, comfortable and secure environment to the tenant.
Raising the Bar
With volatile electricity pricing, an aging infrastructure, and growing stress on the grid, it’s easy to understand why constant monitoring and automation are beneficial for assessing and managing power usage at an efficient level. However, getting a taste for the possibilities of virtual online management presents both advantages and new challenges for facility managers, and online energy management providers are working to anticipate and meet those needs, such as:
- Enabling mobile access to and control of energy use through device apps;
- Allowing an enterprise-wide view of energy consumption;
- Showing weather condition and power consumption correlations;
- Providing custom dashboard views and user-defined roles; and
- Sending automated notifications for price, usage, and load response compliance
Conclusion
As long as power consumption continues to outpace capacity, and investments in grid infrastructure do not keep up, we are all at the mercy of the grid. However, as energy managers learn more about the capabilities available to them in monitoring and managing power use and load curtailment, their strategies will evolve and become more fruitful. Increasingly sophisticated online energy management and automation systems are able to arm businesses with greater visibility into – and control over – power use. Increasingly, the “power” is in the hands of the customer.
About the Author
Peter Kelly-Detwiler is senior vice president, Demand Response, at Constellation NewEnergy, a subsidiary of Constellation Energy Group, Inc. He can be reached at Peter.Detwiler@constellation.com.
